Richard K. Morgan's Blog, page 10

Quest Fellow Blues

He’d paid the whores for the whole afternoon, but in the end couldn’t summon much enthusiasm for a third go round.  Usually, two women at once solved that kind of problem for him, but not today.  Maybe it was the smell of damp wool that still clung to their bodies even after they’d peeled naked for him, maybe the fact he caught the mask of fake arousal falling off the face of the younger one a couple too many times in the act.  That kind of thing stabbed at him, took him out of the moment.  He knew he was paying, but he didn’t like to be reminded of the fact, and back in Yhelteth he wouldn’t have been.

What’s the matter, Dragonbane?  You never fucking happy?  Up on the steppe, you craved all that southern sophistication you’d left behind.  Put you back in the imperial city and you wish you could have the simple life again.  Now here you are with simple whores in a simple back-gutter town and that’s not right for you either.

Ye Gods, he missed Imrana.

Wasn’t talking to the bitch currently, but missed her still.

So when the young one knelt before him on the floor and slipped his flaccid cock into her mouth, while her older companion sat on a stool in the corner, legs apart, lifting one pendulous tit at a time and tonguing the nipple with leering glances in his direction, he just grunted and shook his head.  Hoisted the girl bodily from her knees – his cock slipped back out of her mouth, still pretty much flaccid – and set her aside.  The older whore eyed him warily as he got up off the disheveled bed.  He read her thoughts as if they were tattooed across her face.  No telling what any paying customer might do when they couldn’t get it up, and this one here was big and battle-scarred, and a foreigner to boot, accent harsh and hair all tangled up with alien talismans in iron.  Lurid tales of the Majak had percolated right across the continent in the last couple of centuries – they’d doubtless got as far as the Hironish isles long ago.  Bloody steppe savages, disembowel a girl and cook her on a spit soon as look at her most likely if they got out of bed the wrong side one morning……

He forced a reassuring grimace and went to stare out of the window.  Heard them move behind him with alacrity, start gathering up their clothes and the coin he’d left on the table.  Light-footed, they left in what seemed like seconds and the door of his room clunked shut.  He felt the relief it brought go through his whole frame.  He slumped against the window frame, rested his head on cool glass.  Outside, a light rain was falling into the street, clogging up daylight that was already past its best.  A couple of children went past, splashing deliberately in the puddles and yattering some rhyme he could barely make out.  He’d learnt the League tongue, more or less, while on campaign in the north during the war, but the Hironish accent was hard work.

Yeah, like their fucking awful food and their fucking awful weather and their fucking awful whores.  Three weeks in this shit-hole already, and still no-

Commotion downstairs.  A woman shrieked.  Furniture went over.

He frowned.  Cocked his head at the sound.

Another shriek.  Coarse laughter, and men calling to each other.  The words were indistinct, but the rhythms were Majak.

  Uh-oh.

He grabbed his breeches off the bed, trod hurriedly into them on his way to the door.  Shirt off the table as he passed, out into the corridor.  Shouldered into it as he went down the stairs.  No time for boots or other refinement, because-

He arrived on the ground floor of the inn, barefoot and undone.  Surveyed the scene before him.

There were three of them.  Shendanak’s men, just in from the street by the look of it, felt coats still buttoned up and damp across the shoulders from the rain.  One had the younger of Egar’s whores grasped firmly by the crotch and one tit, was nuzzling and licking at her neck.  The other two seemed engaged in facing down the innkeeper.

“Oi!”  Egar barked, in Majak.  “Fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The one holding the whore looked up.  “Dragonbane!” he bawled.  “Brother!  We were just looking for you!  Get your drinking boots on!  ‘s time to light this shit-hole town right the fuck up -  Majak style!”

Egar nodded slowly.  “I see.  Whose idea was that, then?”

“Old Klarn, mate!  The man himself.”  The whore bucked and twisted in the speaker’s grip.  She sank teeth into his forearm.  He winced and grinned, let go of her crotch, used the free hand to squeeze her jaws open and force her head back, clear of his flesh.  Looked like she’d left a pretty distinct bite there in the thick muscle behind the wrist, welling blood and everything, but the Majak’s voice barely wavered from its previous slurring good cheer.  Egar estimated he’d been drinking a while.  “Said how we’ve been soft-soaping around these fish-fuckers for long enough.  Time to get steppe-handed on their arses. In’t that right, boys?”

Growls of approval from the other two.  By now they had the innkeeper bent back over his own bar with the flat of a knife blade tapping under his chin and his legs dangling a couple of inches off the sawdusted floor.  They flashed cheery, inclusive grins at the Dragonbane.

Egar jerked his chin at the girl.  “That’s my whore you’ve got there.  Let her go.”

  “Your whore?”  The other Majak’s face was suddenly a lot less friendly.  “Who says she’s yours?  She’s down here waggling her tits and arse in grown men’s faces, she-”

“She’s paid until sunset.”  Egar shifted his stance a little, squaring up.  He nodded at the older whore.  “They both are.  They’re down here getting me a drink and a platter.  So let her go.  And you two – let him up as well.  How’s the poor fucker supposed to pull my pint for me, if you have him pinned?”

The two Majak at the bar were happy enough to obey.  Maybe they’d been drinking less, maybe they were just more intelligent men.  They nodded amiably, backed off the innkeeper and let him scramble loose.  The one with the knife put his weapon away with a sheepish grin.  But the guy with his arm round the whore was going to be a harder push.  As Egar watched, he tightened his grip.

“My coin’s as good as anybody’s,” he growled.

Egar took a casual step forward.  Measured the room without seeming to.  “Then get in the queue with it.  Or find yourself another whore.  You’re not having mine.”

The other Majak’s hand strayed down towards his belt and the big-hilted killing knife sheathed there.  He barely seemed aware of the motion.

“You’ve got ‘til sunset,” he said gruffly, almost reasonably, as if trying to put the case to some court in his own head.  “I’ll not need long.”

“I’m not going to tell you again.  Let her go.” 

Egar saw the other man make his decision, saw it in his eyes even before he went for the knife.  His hand clamped down on the hilt, but the Dragonbane was already in motion.  Across the scant space between them, bottle snatched up off the table to his right, sweeping in, and a braining stroke across the Majak’s head.  He gave it all he had, was actually a bit surprised when the bottle didn’t break first time.  The other man reeled from the blow, Egar stepped in after him, swung again, back-handed, and this time – yes! - the glass came apart in a burst of shards and cheap beer.  The Majak went down, bleeding from multiple gouges in his forehead.  The whore got loose and scurried behind her colleague, the injured man crawled dizzily about on the floor, blood running into his eyes.  Egar curled one foot back, mindful of his naked toes and kicked the man hard in the face before he could get up.  He brandished the business end of the shattered bottle admonishingly at the other two.

“You boys plan to paint the town, you aren’t going to start in here.  Got it?”

Quiet.  Beer dripped wetly off the jagged angles of the bottle stump.

The two remaining Majak looked at their companion, curled up on the floor and twitching, then back to the wet gleam of Egar’s makeshift weapon.  Rage and confusion struggled on their faces, but so far that was as far as it went.  He saw they were both pretty young, reckoned he might be able to play this one out.  He waited.  Watched one of them rake a hand perplexedly back through his hair and make an angry gesture.

“Look, Dragonbane, we thought-”

“Then you thought wrong.”  He had his reputation and his age – things that would have counted for something among Majak back on the steppe, and might play here, if these two hadn’t been away from home too long.

If not, well…..

If not, he had bare feet and a broken bottle.  And glass shards on the floor.

  Nice going, Dragonbane.

  Better make this good.

He put on his best Clanmaster voice.   “I am guesting here, you herd-end fuckwits.  My bond with these people compels me, under the eyes of the Dwellers, to defend them.  Or don’t the shamans teach you that shit anymore when you’re coming up?”

The two young men looked at each other.  It was a dodgy interpretation of Majak practice at best – outside of some small ritual gifts, you didn’t pay for guesting out on the steppe. Lodging at a tavern or a rooming house, say, in Ishlin-ichan, wasn’t considered the same thing at all.  But Egar was Skaranak and these two were  border Ishlinak, and they might not know enough about their northerly cousins to be sure, and in the end, hey, this old guy killed a fucking dragon back in the day, so……

The one on the floor groaned and tried groggily to prop himself up.

Time running out.

Egar pointed downward with the bottle.  Played out his high cards.  “And what do your clan elders have to say about this shit?  Stealing another man’s whore out from under his nose?  That okay, is it?”

“He didn’t kn-”

“Pulling a knife on a brother?  That okay with you, is it?”

“But you-”

  “I’m done fucking talking about this!”  Egar let the bottle hang at his side, like he had no need of it at all.  He stabbed a finger at them instead, played the irascible clan elder to the hilt.  “Now you get him up, and you get him the fuck out of my sight.  Get him out of here while I’m still in a good mood.”

They dithered.  He barked.  “Go on!  Take your fucking party somewhere else!”

Something gave in their faces.  Their companion stirred on the floor again and they hurried to him.  Egar gave them the space, relieved.  Kept the bottle ready at his side.  They propped the injured man up between them, got his arms over their shoulders, and turned for the door.  One of them found some small piece of face-saving bravado on the way out.  He twisted awkwardly about with his half of the burden.  The anger still hadn’t won out on his face, but it was hardening that way.

“You know, Klarn isn’t going to wear this.”

Egar jutted his chin again.  “Try him.  Klarn Shendanak is steppe to the bone.  He’s going to see this exactly the way it is – a lack of fucking respect where it’s due.  Now get out.”

They went, out into the rain, left the door swinging wide in their wake.  The Dragonbane found himself alone in a room full of staring locals.

Presently, someone got up from a table and shut the door.  Still, no-one spoke, still they went on staring at him.  He realised the whole exchange had been in Majak, would have been incomprehensible to everybody there.

He realised he was still holding the jag-ended bottle stump.

He laid it down on the table he’d swiped the bottle from in the first place.  Its owner flinched  back in his chair.  Egar sighed.  Looked over at the innkeeper.

“You’d better keep that door barred for the time being,” he said in Naomic.  Too the room more generally, he added:  “Anyone has family home alone right now, you might want to drink up and get on back to them.”

There was some shuffling among the men, some muttering back and forth, but no-one actually got up or moved for the door. They were all still intent on him, the barefoot old thug with iron in his hair and his shirt hanging open on a pelt going grey.

They were all still trying to understand what had just happened.

He sympathised.  He’d sort of hoped -

  Fucking Shendanak. 

He picked his way carefully through the shards of broken glass on the floor, past the stares, and went upstairs to get properly dressed.

He wanted his boots on for the next round.

 

*

 

He found Shendanak holding court outside the big inn on League street where he’d taken rooms.  The Majak-turned-imperial-merchant had had a rough wooden table brought out into the middle of the street, and he was sat there in the filtering rain, a flagon of something at his elbow, watching three of his men beat up a Hironish islander.  He saw Egar approaching and raised the flagon in his direction.

“Dragonbane.”

“Klarn.”  Egar stepped around the roughing up, fended his way past an overthrown punch that skidded inexpertly off the islander’s skull, shoved them all impatiently aside.  “You want to tell me what the fuck’s going on?”

Shendanak surfaced from the flagon and wiped his whiskers.  “Not my idea, brother.  Tand’s getting his tackle in a knot, shouting about how these fish-fuckers know something they’re not telling us.  Starts in on how I’m too soft to do what it takes to find out what we need to know.  Come on, what am I supposed to do?  Can’t take that lying down, can I?  Not from Tand.”

“So instead, you’re going to take orders from him?”

“Nah, it’s not like that.  It’s a competition, isn’t it, boys.”  The Majak warriors stopped what they were doing to the islander for a moment, looked up like dogs called off.  Shendanak waved them back to the task.  “Tand sets his mercenaries to interrogating.  I do the same with the brothers.  See who finds out where that grave and that treasure is first.  Thousand elemental pay-off and a public obeisance for the winner.”

“Right.”  Egar sat on the edge of the table and watched as two of the Majak held the islander up while a third planted heavy punches into his stomach and ribs.  “Menith Tand‘s a piece-of-shit slave trader with a hard-on for hurting people, and he’s bored.  What’s your excuse?”

Shendanak squinted at him thoughtfully.

“Heard about your little run in with Nabak.  You really bottle him over some fishwife whore you wouldn’t share?  Doesn’t sound like you.”

“I bottled him because he pulled a knife on me.  You need to keep a tighter grip on your cousins, Klarn.”

“Oh, indeed.”

It was hard to know if there’d been a question in Shendanak’s voice or not.  Abruptly, his eyes widened and he grabbed the flagon again, lifted it off the table top as the islander staggered back into the table and clung there, panting.  The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose, his lips were split and torn where they’d been smashed repeatedly into his teeth.  Both his eyes were blackening closed and his right hand looked to have been badly stomped.  Still, he pushed himself up off the table with a snarl.  Shendanak’s men bracketed him, dragged him-

“You know what,”  said Shendanak brightly.  He gestured with the flagon  “I really don’t think this one knows anything.  Why don’t you let him go?  Just leave him there.  Go on and have a drink before we start on the next one.  It’s thirsty work, this.”

The Majak looked surprised, but they shrugged and did as they were told.  One of them gave the beaten man a savage kick behind the knee and then spat on him as he collapsed in the street.  Laughter, barked and bitten off.  Then the three of them went back into the inn, shaking out their scraped knuckles and talking up the blows they’d dealt.  Shendanak watched them through the door, waited for it to close before he looked back at Egar.

“My cousins are getting restless, Dragonbane.  They were promised an adventure in a floating alien city and a battle to the death against a black shaman warrior king.  So far, both those things have been conspicuous by their absence.”

“And you think beating the shit out of the local populace is going to help?”

“Of course not.”  Shendanak leaned up and peered over the table at where the islander lay collapsed on the greasy cobbles.  Settled back in his seat.  “But it will let the men work out some of their frustration.  It will exercise them.  And anyway, like I said, I really can’t lose face to a sack of shit like Menith Tand.”

“I’m going to talk to Tand,” growled Egar.  “Right now.”

Shendanak shrugged.  “Do that.  But I think you’ll find he doesn’t believe these interrogations are going to help any more than I do.  That’s not what this is about.  Tand’s men are better trained than mine, but in the end they’re soldiers just the same.  And you and I both know what soldiers are like.  They need the violence.  They crave it, and if you starve them of it for long enough, you’re going to have trouble.”

“Trouble.”  Egar spoke the word as if he was weighing it up.  “So let me get this straight – you and Tand are doing this because you want to avoid trouble?”

“In essence, yes.”

“In essence, is it?”  Fucking court-crawling wannabe excuse for a…….  He held it down.  Measured his tone.  “Let me tell you a little war story, Klarn.  You know, the war you managed to sit out, back in the capital with your horse farms and your investments?”

“Oh, here we fucking go.”

“Yeah, well.  You talk about soldiers like you ever were one, so I thought I’d better set you straight.  Back in the war, when we came down out of the mountains at Gallows Gap, I had this little half-pint guy marching at my side.  League volunteer, never knew his name.  But we talked some, the way you do.  He told me he came from the Hironish isles, cursed the day he ever left.  You want to know why?”

“Not really.”  Tand sighed.  “But I guess you’re going to tell me anyway.”

“He left the islands, married a League woman and made a home in Rajal.  When the Scaled Folk came, he saw his wife and kids roasted and eaten.  Only made it out himself because the roasting pit collapsed in on itself that night and he got buried in the ash.  You want to try and imagine that for a moment?  Lying there choking in hot ash, in silence, surrounded by the picked bones of your family, until the lizards fuck off to dig another pit.  He burnt his bonds off in the embers – I saw the scarring on his arms – then he crawled a quarter of a mile along Rajal beach through the battle dead to get away.  Are you listening to me, you brigand fuckwit?”

Shendanak’s gaze kindled, but he never moved from the chair.  Horse thief, bandit and cut-throat in his youth, he’d likely still be handy in a scrap, despite his advancing years and the prodigious belly he’d grown.  But they both knew how it’d come out if he and the Dragonbane clashed.  He made a pained face, sat back and folded his arms.

“Yes, Dragonbane, I’m listening to you.”

“At Gallows Gap, that same little guy saved my life.   He took down a pair of reptile peons that got the jump on me.  Lost his axe to the first one, he split its skull and while it was thrashing about dying, it tore the haft right out of his grip.  So he took the other one down with his bare hands.  He died with his arm stuffed down its throat to block the bite.  Tore out its tongue before he bled out.  Am I getting through to you at all?”

“He was from here.  Tough little motherfucker.  Yeah, I get it.”

“Yeah.  If you or Tand stir these people up, you’re going to have a local peasant uprising on your hands.  We won’t cope with that, we’re not an army of occupation.  In fact,”  Egar’s lip curled.  “We’re not an army of any kind.  And we are a long way from home.”

“We have the marines, and the Throne Eternal.”

“Oh, don’t be a fucking idiot.  Even with Tand’s mercenaries and your thug cousins, we have a fighting muster under a hundred and twenty men.  That’s not even garrison strength for a town this size.  These people know the countryside, they know the in-shore waters.  They’ll melt out of Ornley and the hamlets, they’ll disappear, and then start picking us off at their leisure.  We’ll be forced back to the ships – if some fisher crew doesn’t manage to sneak in and burn those to the waterline as well – and we haven’t even provisioned for the trip back yet.  It’s better than two weeks south to Gergis, and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do it on rainwater and rat-meat.”

“Well, now.”  Shendanak made a show of examining his nails – it was pure court performance, something he must have picked it up on the long climb to wealth and power back in Yhelteth.  It made Egar want to crush his skull.  “Getting a bit precious about our campaigning in our old age, aren’t we Egar?  Tell me, did you really kill that dragon back in the war?  I mean, it’s just – you don’t talk much like a spit-blood-and-die dragonslayer.”

Egar bared his teeth in a rictus grin.  “You want a spanking, Klarn, right in front of your men?  I’ll be happy to oblige.  Just keep riding me.”

Again, the glint of suppressed rage in Shendanak’s eye.  His jaw set, his voice came out soft and silky.  “Don’t get carried away here, Dragonbane.  You’re not your faggot friend, you know.  And he’s not here to back you up, either.”

Egar swore later, if it hadn’t been for that last comment, he would have let it slide.

Just Fine and Dandy

Just spent a couple of days climbing here – my first outing on real rock for about four months, my first bout of serious climbing indoors or out for at least three.  At my age you pay a price for that – I am sunburnt, tender at the fingertips and toes, a mass of tightly aching muscles and minor cuts and bruises, and it feels fucking great!!!  Never realised just how much I missed those small, judicious doses of pain and being scared shitless.

Also feeling great about:

1) Pete Holmstrom of the Dandy Warhols got in touch and asked if I'd like to reprise my fictional biogs for the band on their new album, This Machine, which comes out next month.  Slightly trickier work for me this time around, since there was no SF theme to the new stuff.  But working off one of the stand-out tracks from the album, some fresh publicity shots of the band, and chasing my recent penchant for Implication rather than Spell Out, I came up with this.  Enjoy.

2) The Cold Commands gets nominated for

3) Y'know, the whole fatherhood thing – just gets deeper, more intense, more wonderful with every passing week.  Getting back into Ringil Eskiath's grim, murderous shoes is harder work these days, definitely……..

Cover Blown!

I know, I know.  It's been a bit quiet around here lately.  The quiet rasp of e-crickets, the odd tumbleweed blowing across this section of the information superhighway.  No word for over two months.  Almost as if I've gone, as if I'm…….not there.

And to some extent that's true.  I'm not there, I'm here:

Which, in turn, is roughly here

Well, my son does need an introduction to his mother's culture.  And more Vitamin D than it's easy to get hold of under Glasgow skies in winter.

That's my excuse, anyway.

And I would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!

More specifically, I would have got away with it, if it hadn't been for one Andrew Carter of Salisbury – hi there, Andrew! – a fully-paid-up Subterranean-Press-edition-owning fan of my books whom I ran into completely randomly at my local bar/restaurant in a tiny mountain hamlet out in (to quote a northern friend of mine) the back arse of nowhere.  Mutual incognition on my and Andrew's part – we were in conversation for a good twenty minutes before either of us made the connection.

So that's a first for me – I've never just stumbled on a fan like that before.  And after almost a decade of being published in the UK, I had to come all the way out to southern Spain to do it.  Weird.

Anyway, since my cover is now blown, here's a brief update of what's been going on recently in my writerly life:

- 21st of this month, Electronic Arts and Starbreeze release Syndicate, the FPS re-boot of the classic nineties game of the same name.   Multi-platform launch, and Yours Truly as lead writer.  Prepare yourselves for amoral corporate mayhem, viscerally brutal anti-heroes, and a headlong SF narrative plunge.

- also this month, look out for an official announcement and status update on the Altered Carbon film deal – some very  impressive names attached (none of which I'm at liberty to divulge right now, but watch this space….)

- meanwhile, Market Forces is in informal development with Forward Films – of recent Grabbers fame – in London.  Forward's Kate Myers has been a friend of my work for nearly a decade now; it was she who first mooted the idea of an Altered Carbon movie, back before anyone in Hollywood had had it brought to their attention, back before the book had even hit the shelves, in fact.  Now, she's bringing the same vision to bear on the wolf-eat-hyena world of future corporate finance and one Chris Faulkner's blood-stained rise to power.  So keep your fingers crossed.

- The Dark Defiles is up and running, with a surly, downbeat opening to match.  Oh, a Questing we Shall Go, a Questing we Shall Go….. Sort of.  I'll be posting the first excerpts later in the year.

- another reason for being out here in southern Spain is to scratch a long-standing creative itch I've had since at least the late nineties; a vaguely Urban, vaguely Heroic Fantasy narrative set right here in Andalucia.  Research is on-going (in-between nappy changes) and I'm now starting to see the shape this could take.  Not sure yet if it might not work better as a comic-book sequence rather than a prose novel, actually.  Hmm.

Right, that's all for now, folks.  Got to get back now to the education of my son as a future Go master:

 

 

Blush Response

Okay – the dust has settled a little now, I guess, and as it does, I'm delighted to announce that The Cold Commands made both Kirkus Reviews' top SFF novels of 2011 and Amazon's Best Gay and Lesbian Books of the year.  Needless to say, I'm deeply honoured by this latter accolade, and over the moon about Kirkus, whose original review also carried what has to be my favourite critical quote for a very long time; they called The Cold Commands "bleakly magnificent."  So yeah, I'm blushing.

Some other, more in-depth responses that I loved are here and here.  And on a closer, more personal note, the number of e-mails I've received from gay readers thanking me for creating Ringil continues to grow.  Particularly moving, I thought, was this one from an ex-serviceman:

"As an ex-military "faggot" who had to worry about the "witch hunts" and consequently survived them, thank you for Ringil. Not all of us fit the "Queer as Folk" mold." 

It seems, despite the knee-jerk flinching away in some critical circles that followed publication of The Steel Remains in 2008, that I have got hold of something worthwhile here after all – and rest assured, I'll be mining it for all it's worth!  Dark Defiles – incoming.  Watch this Space!

 

 

 

 

Ringil at the Movies

So I thought this was pretty cool.

Courtesy of the good people at Gollancz, text by yours truly.  Enjoy.

No Sleep ’til Forbidden Planet

So it’s official – the 2011 Cold Commands UK tour kicks off the day after publication, with the first gig in my adoptive hometown, here:

14th October
5.30pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
152 – 157 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow

swinging over to Edinburgh on Saturday:

15th October
12.30pm – Signing
Waterstones (West End)
128 Princes Street

and departing thereafter for points south over the following week, thus:

17th October
6.30pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
Emerson Chambers
Blackett Street
Newcastle
*
18th October
12.30pm – Signing
Waterstones
28-29 High Ousegate
York

7pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
93-97 Albion Street
Leeds
*
19th October 12.30pm – Signing Waterstones Liverpool One College Lane Liverpool
CANCELLED

7pm – Talk and Signing Waterstones Bridlesmith Gate Nottingham
CANCELLED
*
20th October 12.30pm – Signing Waterstones High Street Birmingham
CANCELLED

6.30pm – Talk and signing Waterstones Broad Street Reading
CANCELLED
*
21st October
2.30pm - Signing
Forbidden Planet Megastore
Clifton Heights
Triangle West
Bristol

7pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
High Street
Guildford
*
22nd October 2011
1pm – Signing
Forbidden Planet Megastore
Shaftesbury Avenue
London

I’m also informed there may be a Bristol date squeezed in there somewhere, but that’s yet to be confirmed, so watch this space!  (Stop Press – and there is indeed a Bristol date, and here it is, slotted in above)

See you on the road!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No Sleep 'til Forbidden Planet

So it's official – the 2011 Cold Commands UK tour kicks off the day after publication, with the first gig in my adoptive hometown, here:

14th October
5.30pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
152 – 157 Sauchiehall Street
Glasgow

swinging over to Edinburgh on Saturday:

15th October
12.30pm – Signing
Waterstones (West End)
128 Princes Street

and departing thereafter for points south over the following week, thus:

17th October
6.30pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
Emerson Chambers
Blackett Street
Newcastle
*
18th October
12.30pm – Signing
Waterstones
28-29 High Ousegate
York

7pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
93-97 Albion Street
Leeds
*
19th October
12.30pm – Signing
Waterstones Liverpool One
College Lane
Liverpool

7pm – Talk and Signing
Waterstones
Bridlesmith Gate
Nottingham
*
20th October
12.30pm – Signing
Waterstones
High Street
Birmingham

6.30pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
Broad Street
Reading
*
21st October
7pm – Talk and signing
Waterstones
High Street
Guildford
*
22nd October 2011
1pm – Signing
Forbidden Planet Megastore
Shaftesbury Avenue
London

I'm also informed there may be a Bristol date squeezed in there somewhere, but that's yet to be confirmed, so watch this space!

See you on the road!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poets and the Prosaic

As promised, here's the last pre-publication glimpse.  See you in October!

Hinerion, the Trelayne poet laureate Skimil Shend once wrote, is less a city in itself than some weak, far flung echo of the capital it strives at every turn to imitate. It is a cultural and architectural cry that lacks conviction, the coarse cant of some mongrel urchin in the street who has perhaps heard Great Oratory somewhere and knows somewhat how to copy its more obvious features, but has neither the breeding nor the education to truly understand what it is he echoes. Worse yet, this is an urchin rubbing shoulders in the common mob with fellows whose blood origins, worse than uncertain, are most assuredly alien. For Hinerion belongs almost as much to the Southern Scourge as it does to the League. It is nominally in League territory, yes, but tell that to the dusky-faced multitude who throng its streets, jabbering in a variegated confusion of tongues where Naomic is no more honoured in dominion than Tethanne; tell that to the imperial merchants whose vessels mob the harbour with their foreign flags and the mercenaries who with the thinnest of documentary justification come and go on the streets of what is called a League city as if they trod the tiled thoroughfares of Yhelteth itself. They tell me Hinerion is a frontier town, and it must be lived in as such, but from what I see about me at every turn, that frontier is as thin and seeping as the soiled bandage on a war wound that may never heal.

Ringil knew Shend – had in fact fucked him a couple of times in his youth, in curtained alcoves at fashionably seedy parties in the warehouse district – and he was inclined not to judge the poet's vitriol too harshly. Like a lot of wordsmiths, Skim was a delicate soul, exiled to Hinerion at the time of writing, and evidently not handling it very well. That old Trelayne story, the sudden trap-door fall from grace. Jostled from your upriver residence on charges of seditious composition or some such shit, summoned to explain yourself before the Committee for Public Morals and rapidly deserted by your up until then generous patrons – it must have been a rude awakening and Ringil, who'd fallen foul of the Committee himself as a younger man, could well imagine the hole it would have punched in Shend's brittle sense of superiority. The sudden, chilly desperation that might come whistling in through that hole. You'd write – allowing that that was your given talent – pretty much anything if you thought it might curry enough favour to banish that chill. And anti-Yhelteth rhetoric was a safe enough drum to beat if you wanted to ingratiate yourself with the great and the good in Trelayne. Add a judicious seasoning of sycophantic praise for the city and its pontificating elders, and who knew what might be achieved if your friends could only get what you'd written to the attention of the right people.

In Shend's case, it took the best part of three years, but the steady stream of letters to friends and family, loudly professing love of Trelayne and horror at the mongrel mixing of its culture with others, finally did the trick. The poet went home behind a full pardon and a deal with the University to publish his letters as a collected whole titled The Distant Beloved. Ringil had read it, took it with him on the northern expeditionary campaign and subsequently used its pages to wipe his arse.

About one thing, though, Shend had been accurate. Hinerion was indeed a mongrel city, a seething mish-mash of influences from north and south, belonging wholly to neither and thronged with men passing through in both directions.

It was one of the things Ringil, on previous visits, had most liked about the place.

Now, it made it the perfect place to hide.

So they rode in through the Black Sail Gate towards dusk, subsumed in a gaggle of arrivals off ships whose masters had no certification to enter the main harbour and must dock a mile and a half down the coast from the city walls. The secondary harbour was a shabby affair, little more than a collection of jetties off a mud beach into deeper water and an array of flimsy wooden shacks strung out along the dirt road into town. Tavern, brothel, and chandler's store, there was really little else to see, and the City Watch pointedly did not extend its protective remit to any of it. With that in mind, most shipmasters hired cheap mercenary cover to protect their vessels at anchor and to escort their passengers and cargo to and from the city. Hard-bitten thugs on horseback and the well-used steel they carried were a commonplace on the Black Sail Road, and there was no reason Eril and Ringil should not pass as such. Both of them were grubby and travel-stained enough, and Ringil had bagged his black brocade cloak in favour of a cheap woollen wrap from the  chandler's store. And he'd bound the Ravensfriend's scabbard tightly with strips of shredded saddle blanket back in the forest, daubed firegrime and ashes all over pommel, hilt and guard until you could no longer tell the weapon for what it really was. His face was similarly grimed to soften the impact of the scar and mask his feverish pallor, which latter he was concerned might be taken by some sharp-eyed sentry for the possible onset of plague.

Might as well have fucking plague, the way I feel right now.

Quit whining, hero.

He gritted his teeth to hold down the shivering, and hoped his blank and fevered stare would pass for standard fuck-off profession-of-violence detachment.

He needn't have worried. The guard detail at the gate, bored and yawning to a man, spared the two of them no more than a cursory glance while the captain took and pocketed the levy. They were not even asked to dismount. The crossed pikes lifted out of their path, the captain waved them through.

 

 

The touts surged into the road as soon as they passed inside the gate, most of them boys not over the age of ten.

'Rooms, good sirs, rooms. Fine ocean view.'

'Stabling of imperial quality, imperial trained grooms…'

'Fine wines, my lords, and fine females to serve them. Girls practised with the neck of a bottle, know what I mean, my lord?'

Ringil urged his horse level with Eril's.

'Get someplace close to the harbour,' he muttered. 'But not so close we have to smell it. Views down to the docks, I want to be able to see what's moored.'

Eril nodded. 'On it.'

'Then meet me down in the main square. Bounty office, under the south colonnade.'

'Right.' Eril gave him a narrow look. 'You okay?'

'No,' said Ringil shakily. 'But there's fuck all I can do about it right now. See you down there.'

He wheeled his horse aside, out of the flow of the main thoroughfare and onto one of the steeper, less used alleys that led more directly down into Hinerion's centre. The horse didn't like it much, but he stroked her neck repeatedly as they worked their way downward, talked down her worry as soothingly as he could with the continual jagged shivering coming up through his sternum and along his limbs.

'You and me both, girl,' he murmured. 'You and me both.'

Down at the south colonnade, he put away the trembling with a grunt, like a book he hadn't much enjoyed, and dismounted by the bounty office rail. He tied the horse, found an urchin to watch it for a coin, and stepped in under the colonnaded roof. The doors to the bounty office were propped wide; yellowish lamplight spilled out onto the paving and the ragged huddle of men stood or seated round about. They were a dozen strong and their profession announced itself with the here-and-there gleam of cheap, notched steel; an axe slung across a broad back and peeking over the shoulder, a sword whose owner made do with a loop of rope at his belt in place of a scabbard; a couple of nasty looking Parashal knives, a Majak-style staff lance that you could tell at ten paces was a fake.

In general, the men were a match for their weapons, grubby and scarred and worn down by use.

Well – don't suppose you look too shiny yourself at the moment, Gil.

The gathered company appeared to have drawn the same conclusion. They looked up incuriously as he stepped into the light, made him for one of their own, and went right back to the muttered conversations and dice games that had occupied them before. One grizzled older warrior jerked a long-bearded chin at him in a fashion that might have been meant amiably.

Ringil returned the nod, put on a stock Yhelteth accent but stayed in Naomic. 'Busy tonight. Something going down?'

'You haven't heard?' A pale, eye-patched swordsman, turning from some minor dispute he was having with the owner of the fake Majak lance. 'Road scum took down a big fucking slave caravan this morning. Less than ten miles outside the city walls. Broad fucking daylight. Set about five hundred slaves free and killed the fuck out of everybody else. Where've you been man? The whole fucking city's buzzing with this one.'

Ringil gestured. 'Came in the Black Sail Gate half an hour ago. Laraninthal of Shenshenath.  First time back in League territory for a year. How many heads we talking about?'

'Lot of enough for the everybody,' someone grunted, crude mimicry of Gil's southern accent, laced with the archetypal imperial's stumblings in Naomic grammar. There like a blade, like the teeth in a sneer, and then just as suddenly shed for a bored, sour-edged disdain. 'Just get in the fucking queue, southman.'

Some snickering in the wake of the comment, and it seemed to centre among the dice crew. The bone cubes rattled down and the man who'd thrown them glanced up at Ringil, to see if offence had been taken. The studied blankness in his eyes said he didn't much care one way or the other.

'Twenty, thirty heads at least,' the bearded warrior said hurriedly. 'Got to be, those caravans are well protected. Seems like the border patrol got about a score of them, fighting a rearguard, but the rest escaped.'

Ringil broke gaze with the dice man, looked in instead through the doors of the office, where a clerk sat yawning at a desk, poring over an open tome with a quill. Behind him, a couple of others bustled about with more ledgers and capped scrolls. A handful of other bounty hunters had chosen to stay inside, seated at the edges of the room and watching the paperwork.

'So.' The urge to shiver made it easier to fake the Yhelteth accent, kept his jaw tight and guttural on the Naomic syllables. 'Fifty outlaws, hiding in the forest. Sounds pretty vague to me. That all they've got?'

Eye-patch shook his head excitedly, flung thin, hanging threads of greasy hair about his pallid features. Behind the vertical scar that sat above and below the patch as if skewering it, he was younger than Ringil had noticed at first.

'No, man, that's not all. They're saying these guys had, like, this sorcerer for a leader, some magicked-up fuck down from Trelayne, carrying a Black Folk blade. They say he's already wanted up north for treason, already got a twenty-five thousand florin price on his head.'

'Twenty-five thousand…' Ringil let his voice die off in carefully textured disbelief. 'That does not seem likely.'

'I'm serious, man. They took some prisoners, got them up at the Keep and they're putting them to the question. Some of the slaves, too. That's the word coming down. Fucking sorcerer, man.'  The young bounty hunter nodded in at the clerks. 'Go ask for yourself, you don't believe me.'

Ringil tipped him a sceptical look, then shrugged and stepped past, over the threshold of the opened doors and into the lamp-lit confines of the office.

The clerk looked up as he came in. 'Yes?'

'Man outside says you're hunting a sorcerer.'

'That's unconfirmed.' The clerk put his quill aside and knuckled tiredly at one eye. 'We had a raid on a caravan coming down the Trelayne road last night, attackers still at large. Probably a lot of them. We're waiting on names.'

'How much you paying for heads?'

'Fifty per. Hundred if you bring them in alive. Maybe get you more later if the caravan owners put up a reward.'

'Alive?' Ringil pulled a face. 'In Tlanmar, they pay me seventy per, dead or alive. That's Empire elementals too, comes out at a hundred and twenty florins' worth, near enough.'

The clerk shrugged. 'So go back to working for Tlanmar. Here, you'll get fifty florins per head, a hundred per captured prisoner. You want on the list or not?'

Ringil made a show of grumpy indecision, caught the bounty hunters in the corner of the room nudging each other and grinning at the display. He judged the performance a success, cleared his throat and made an ungracious gesture.

'Well, then. I will go on your list, yes. Laraninthal of Shenshenath.  Captain, retired, 62nd Imperial Levy. Put me down.'

'Some fucking retirement,' said one of the bounty hunters quietly. 'Eh, pal?'

Low, noncommittal laughter among the others. Ringil turned to face the speaker. Saw a League military issue cloak and tunic that had both seen better days, a sword sheathed in leather at the man's belt and another slung naked across his back. The man's features and close-shaven skull were scarred in a couple of places with blade damage, and part of one ear was chopped away. But there was no challenge in his face, and the comment seemed to have been meant without harm.

'I served a cause,' Ringil said stiffly, sticking to the role. 'I served my Emperor and defended my people. That was payment enough for me.'

The shaven-headed man nodded. 'Yeah. And now you're hunting bandits in a foreign land for fifty florins a pop.'

'There's no brawling in here,' the clerk warned. 'Start anything and your name comes off the list. That goes for you too, Klithren.'

The bounty hunter waved it off. 'No one's brawling, inkspurt. Just working men here, trading air and waiting on the names so we can get to work. Right, Shenshenath?'

Ringil nodded curtly, turned back to the desk. 'About this sorcerer. Outside they're saying he's worth twenty-five thousand florins up in Trelayne.'

'I already told you,' said the clerk, writing laboriously, not looking up. 'That's not confirmed. All we know for the moment is that the leader of the attack was a northerner and he may have used a Kiriath blade.'

'Got a description?'

'Yeah. Tall, scary, and a scarred face.'

More dry chuckling amongst the bounty hunters. It was a sketch that would have fitted at least three of the men in the room, and probably half of those who stood outside as well. It was a caricature for a campfire tale.

Well, so are you these days, Gil. So are you.

The clerk scratched to a halt on the ledger page and reached to dip his quill. He glanced up at Ringil, as if surprised to see him still standing there.

'That's it, we're done. You're on the list. Come back at first light or take a seat and wait, your choice.'

'Do you expect names before dawn?'

'The Keep does a pretty good line in questioning,' Ringil's shaven-headed new friend offered. 'I doubt any of the road scum they took are going to stand up for long. Some'll be injured, some just cowards. They'll break right down.'

No doubt.

Ringil had seen prisoners put to the question before, and some of them most assuredly not cowards. In the end, it made no difference. Everybody broke.

Yeah. Broke and said just exactly whatever the fuck they thought their torturers wanted to hear. I did it, yes, I'm guilty, oh yes. With poison, yes, that's right. With a blade, yes, just as you say, a blade I threw in the sea. With black magic I did it, yes, yes, you're right, magic and the help of miniature fucking pixies.

He had the measure of the men he'd hired – and then abandoned, Gil, let's not forget that bit – and he knew most would give up everything they knew at the first searing application of heated iron to their flesh. Fortunate then, that they knew so little. Scarcity of detail would anger the interrogators, who in a case like this would be under a lot of pressure to deliver results, and the awful logic of that situation would roll right along, would push them way past the norms to make sure there really was no more to be gleaned. So their captives would have to go on suffering despite their initial confessions, would go on screaming out whatever names or facts still floated intact in the stew of their terror and pain – along with any of a hundred crazed embellishments based on the hit-and-miss exhortations of their tormentors. Truth or lie, sane or not, the captives would offer up anything, any shrieking, sobbing, shuddering stream of contradictory gibberish they believed might take away the agony, might just please stop this dungeon-dim nightmare of crushed and split and fire-scorched flesh.

So yeah – they'd say it was a northern sorcerer with a magical blade and scars on his face; they'd say it was an imperial renegade in full Kiriath mail at the head of a squad of border skirmishers; they'd say it was fucking steppe nomads if you halfway suggested it to them. Any grains of truth in it all would be stamped and mangled beyond useful recognition.

'Rumours and lies and campfire smoke,' he summarised later for Eril, over spiced wine and cleared platters in the tavern. 'Right now, that's all they've got.'

The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer nodded. 'Think it'll stay that way?'

'For a while, yeah. They think they've got a couple of dozen demoralised bad guys hiding out in the forest somewhere. Lot of tough, impatient bounty hunters are going to think that's too good a chance to miss. Come morning, they'll be riding out to see if they can't get an early piece of the action.'

Eril snapped a long shard of bone out of the fowl carcass on the table between them, lounged back and commenced picking his teeth. Watching, Ringil surprised himself with a sudden, forceful recollection of Egar doing much the same thing, and – equally surprising, equally abrupt – he felt his eyes moisten.

…the fuck? He hadn't thought about the Dragonbane in months.

He blinked down the moisture in his eyes. This fucking flu.

Eril took the bone shard out of his mouth, pointed pensively at his companion with it. 'And if they send to Trelayne? Confirm the price on your head and get sketches posted around town?'

Ringil shook his head, tried wearily to keep his thoughts together. 'Going to take a while, even if they do. Use a bonded courier there and back, it's still the best part of a week. A lot more if they let it run through normal channels. Meantime, they've got a few other, more pressing concerns.'

His companion frowned. 'Such as?'

'Such as trying to keep the murder of an imperial legate quiet. Right now, I guarantee you, they're shitting milk and sugared biscuits up at the Keep. They need all the time and quiet they can buy just to work out how they handle the Tlanmar garrison commander when he finally comes calling. This is a frontier town. They've got a lot to lose if that boils down badly.'

'No one mentioned the legate down there in the square, huh?'

'No one. Like it never happened.'

Eril grunted. He was a career criminal, he understood the dynamic. Ringil poured them both more wine.

'Yeah, like that. And there's something else.' He set down the flagon, picked up his goblet and studied its contents without much enthusiasm. Hinerion, as Shend had been fond of whinging, wasn't exactly famed for its viticulture. 'These guys have got the best part of a thousand captured slaves milling around now with no apparent owner. That's a lot of quick cash for the city if they can parcel it out before anyone gets down here from Trelayne to claim ownership.'

'Oho.'

'Yeah. My best guess? Some time in the next couple of days, you're going to see an open auction for city coffers. And I doubt very much they'll be sending any bonded couriers to Trelayne until that's done.'

'Gives us some time, huh?'

'Yeah.' Ringil sipped his wine. Grimaced and put it down again. 'Gives us some time.  So – you see anything good in the harbour?'

The Marsh Brotherhood enforcer gestured with his bone shard at the cheap glass panes of the window they sat beside. The snug was on the ground floor of the inn and it was full dark outside by now; but even through the grubby, distorted glass and the lantern lit gloom beyond, you could make out gathered thickets of mast-tops over the roofs of the intervening houses.

'There's a caravel flying Marsh Daisy pennants tied up at the south dock. Couldn't make out the name from here, even with the spyglass, but she doesn't look familiar.' A shrug. 'No reason she should. Half the merchantmen out of Trelayne fly those pennants now, just to scare off pirates.'

'But they've got to be paying dues, right?'

'Dues, yeah.' Eril pulled a sour face. 'But that doesn't have to mean much of anything any more. When I was coming up in the city, you knew the name and rig of every keel flying the Daisy, and you knew the crew on those ships would be solid Brotherhood to a man. These days…' Another shrug. He stabbed at the fowl carcass with his bone shard, left it sticking there. 'These days, it's like every other fucking thing. Comes down to haggling.'

Ringil tried to muster some enthusiasm. Eating seemed to have pushed back his fever a little, and the Marsh Daisy vessel had the gossamer feel of luck come calling. Dark Lady Firfirdar, seated on her iron throne, blowing the ghost seed off her fingers and into their path, so it danced and lit their way.

'Well, look,' he said reasonably, holding off a deep, rolling urge to shiver. 'At a minimum she's out of Trelayne, and going back there at some point. Now with that, and maybe some haggling like you say, or just a judicious bit of leaning on the captain – I'd say we're nearly home dry.'

Eril nodded. 'Lean on him's right. I'll fucking—'

Quick rapping at the snug door. Both men stiffened and swung to face the sound. Eril's hand slipped under his coat without fuss. Ringil loosened his sleeve where the dragon-tooth dagger was stowed.

'Yes?'

The door opened a crack, and the boy who'd served them earlier stuck his head and one scrawny shoulder around the jamb.

'My lord Laraninthal?' Stumbling over the Tethanne syllables, nervousness taut in the hurried tones. His face was pale and sweaty in the lamplight. A cool combat tension soaked into Ringil's limbs, settled there.

'Yes?'

'Uh… Somebody here to see you, sir. It's uh…' The boy swallowed, licked his lips. 'They're soldiers, my lord.'

 

 

Finnished!

Should I say that I have seen nine tenths of all the islands I'll ever see in what remains of my life? Or that one of them I swam to, in the last rays of a sun still above the horizon at nine at night?

Should I say that I have sat, naked and sweat-soaked among more SF fans and writers – also naked and sweat-soaked – than ever ought decently to be crammed into a darkened space the size of a generously proportioned garden shed?

Should I say that I have seen church pulpits fitted with egg timers to shut priests up, before they have the chance to put to sleep a congregation with their cant?

Or learnt that I am – and indeed most men over the age of thirty are – too old to hear the Song of the Finnish Grasshopper?

Should I say that I have tasted wild strawberries the size of a ladybird shell, exploding with flavour on my tongue like some insane essence of the larger fruit? Or vodka infused with salty liquorice and ice cream flavoured with pitch?

*

Or should I simply say that I have been a Guest of Honour at FinnCon 2011?

Because I have.  And that's what it was like.

*

With many, many thanks to Tino Warinowski, Johanna Ahonen, Paivi Vaatanen, Nalo Hopkinson and David Findlay, the committee and sponsors of FinnCon (and apologies to T.S. Eliot)

It's been a blast.

The Dark Defiles

is the working title.  And I think I've found a soundtrack for it already:

Just discovered this guy via Glasgow's very own Sunny Govan Community Radio. Check out his MySpace page here for more music and wild eyed intensity; this is exactly the kind of thing that drew me to early David Gray (and catapulted me away again when the (mega-successful, by the way) White Ladder album came out) and to Tom McRae.  It's the sneer and the rage that does it – good to see someone else is still carrying that torch.  If there's ever a Ringil movie………